The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Downsampling of digital images is a very important use case for applications running on smaller touch devices like Smart Phones, Tabs, iPADs, etc., as these devices have capabilities to handle images of modest dimensions due to the constrained environment prevalent on these devices. The constrained environment is mainly due to the limited hardware resources available on these devices compared to desktop computer systems, on which most image processing applications are tuned to run. Bicubic downsampling, which is one of the smoothest form of geometrical downsampling, is difficult to implement in such constrained environment, as it is a computationally intensive algorithm that is not deemed feasible for real time rendering on the web.
It is a common practice to store multiple resolutions of a high quality image especially in applications targeted towards the cloud. This is done to improve the user experience by rendering images of resolutions that are appropriate for screens of various sizes. The downside of this approach has always been the additional storage space required to store the multiple resolutions of the same image.